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Everybody loves a good role playing game, right? Everybody loves to read comics, right? Well, even if you don’t, you might still enjoy looking over my attempt to combine these two themes in That’s How We Role, a comic strip written up in the classic black-and-white-daily-newspaper-funny-page style. One of my very favorite activities is drawing cartoons, but every strip needs to have a theme, whether it’s a beagle who likes to sleep on top of his doghouse, or a “soap opera” depicting the everyday trials and tribulations of the (usually) upper middle class. Well, here’s a spoof on fantasy, but I hope you don’t take Dungeons and Dragons or The Lord of the Rings too seriously, because my cartoons tend to go out of their way to treat their source material with irreverence.

Basically, the storyline is told from the perspective of a wizard, an elf and a dwarf. Such characters suggest that they’ll always be going up against fire breathing dragons or hoards of goblins in a world full of valiant knights, imposing castles and damsels in distress. Well, okay, that’s always a possibility, but why stop there? One day, my trio of intrepid travelers may find themselves at the mercy of the sort of villain you might find at your doorstep on Halloween, and the very next day, they’re liable to be looking down the barrel of a firearm wielded by a train-robbing desperado. Or maybe they’re out scaling the Himalayas in search of an Abominable Snowman who owes the ruler of Jupiter back taxes. You just never know (I just never know either)!

I wish I could call my comic strip “fun for the entire family”, but that would really depend on how much everyone enjoys reading comics in general. You really don’t have to worry about any graphic violence (for one thing, I’m not that good of an artist). For the most part, the worst it gets is what you might call the “slapstick variety”. Swearwords are always replaced by the classic punctuation symbols like “%#@!#”, so if you’re really desperate, you can always imagine what’s being spewed out by the characters. And who’s got time for making it dirty when you’ve got so little space to devote to the action?

So, here it is. If you like That’s How We Role, I’ll be happy to keep right on cranking out more for you to read. If you don’t like it, just come back in a few years or decades. I hope to be a better cartoonist by then.